In the last two years I worked on advanced modeling with Analysis Services. One result of this was the paper " The many-to-many revolution " I released in September 2006. Since then, I got a lot of feedback and I have been working on other evolutions  Read more

Almost two months ago I wrote a post about the lack of multi-phase data pump control in Management Studio "legacy" user interface for DTS. Microsoft answered that documentation has the workaround I have found using RegEdit... In the meantime, I received  Read more

Chris Webb has recently released a really interesting tool: MDX Script Performance Analyzer . It's a really interesting idea that will save me (and you) a lot of time trying to understand the root of a performance issue into an MDX Script of a cube. Thank  Read more

I just posted this bug on the Microsoft Connect site. Please vote it if you think it would be a useful change. This is the issue description. If you set the"Aggregation Usage" to true for an attribute of a dimension (i.e. Customer), you cannot run the  Read more

I found an interesting "how-to" guide to Excel 2007 Pivot Table. It is a sample chapter from the Pivot Table Data Crunching for Microsoft Office Excel 2007 book. Probably not all the described feature are available in a Pivot Table attached to an Analysis  Read more

I have been notified of this strange bug in Analysis Services 2005 that is easily reproducable. ****************************************************************** PLEASE DO NOT TRY THIS TEST ON A PRODUCTION SERVER! IT HANGS ANALYSIS SERVICES!!! ******************************************************************  Read more

I am proud to announce that SQLBI community will be at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference 2007 (May 9-11, 2007 – Seattle). You can meet me and Alberto Ferrari in the User Group Area, booth #532 . We will try to make our booth visible with  Read more

Alberto Ferrari wrote an interesting post about the need of more properties to control the behavior of a Merge component in Integration Services (SSIS). This apparent simple problem becomes very important in large data warehouses. I hope that someone  Read more

Alberto Ferrari posted some test we made working on performance optimization loading data in very large dimension tables. When we discovered that an int identity primary key is not handled by SQL Server just as an ordered set of data in a bulk operation...  Read more

If you edit a legacy DTS package with SQL Server Management Studio, you may want to know how we can show the multi-phase data pump operations. I haven't found an option to do this with SQL Server Management Studio. However, when you need to do something,  Read more